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As I came into womanhood, and began to define who I was, drinking became intrinsically linked to that self-image. I realized quickly that I could drink more than a lot of the other young women I knew. I didn’t throw up while I was drinking, I didn’t shut myself down as soon as I started to feel drunk. This adult Bailey could drink with the boys, could go all night, could pound beers, could keep up.

I have no idea if I was as sloppy then as I am now, or if that’s just something that evolved with age, like my hangovers did. Maybe it didn’t matter, because we were all sloppy, so no one noticed. All the girls I was friends with liked to party; we would get dressed to go out dancing while drinking room-temperature gin and listening to the pop music of the new millennium.

We didn’t give much thought to casual sex, or “hook up culture,” as Cosmo eventually told us it was called. It wasn’t something to consider with the critical feminist thought we were getting through our university education, it was just the way things were. And we were “fun girls,” which is probably The Cool Girl’s little sister, the Skipper to The Cool Girl’s Barbie.

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A Fun Girl was a party girl; we listened to Sublime as much as we listened to Beyoncé, we smoked a little weed but never got into anything harder, we drank as much beer as we did vodka. Where The Cool Girl never nagged, The Fun Girl never even wondered if he’d call. He would or he wouldn’t; it didn’t matter, because every night was a chance to meet someone new.

The world was one big frat party, and we always wanted a drink.

Then, I turned 30, and I became a new kind of drunk woman. A blackout drinker, which makes the morning after a binge completely anxiety-producing. Some days I would find notes next to my bed, or in my phone, completely incomprehensible, but I assume it was Drunk Bailey trying to assure Hungover Bailey that everything was fine, Blackout Bailey had done nothing to be ashamed of.

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I lived in constant fear that I had done something I should be ashamed of.

“Do you remember that?” became the most loathed phrase in my life. I didn’t remember, I didn’t want to remember and I hated to be reminded.

I decided I just needed to manage my drinking, and I came up with various methodologies to do so. I’ve yet to find the magic combination, but I was constantly finessing it. I was always convinced I had solved the problem of my drinking by the time I had my next drink. Close to the end of my drinking, my alchemy to avoid blackouts involved calculating macros, counting drinks, chugging water from random bar bathroom taps and always cutting myself off after, “just this last drink.”

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In sobriety, I found women get a certain type of alcohol marketing aimed at us.

It’s all Drunk Mommy marketing, wry and self-deprecating. Or it’s self-assured, skinny Single Gal advertising, filling us up just a little bit more. The Sex and the City boom just about martini-ed us to death.

In the past 200 days, I’ve noticed the world is telling me to have a drink. But not just one drink. Several.

I’ve got to drain the workday blues and celebrate my liberation, embrace my empowerment and drink away the pressure of Having It All.

But you can’t have TOO many. Too Many is Your Fault. Too Many is too flirtatious in a world where I’m told to smile by strangers. Too Many is acting slutty in a world where I’m told I’m valued mainly for my body. Too Many is akin to jogging in a dark alley, to hitchhiking alone, to asking for it.

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The hardest thing to give up in sobriety was the type of drinking I never did in the first place. A casual glass of wine on a sunny patio, something to sip slowly while the sun warms you up. A nightcap of bourbon, just one, sticky enough to slow down my mind and help me sleep. A beer on a beach, fresh enough to cut the salty air surrounding you.

Those sound hyper-romanticized because, in my mind, they are. Two-hundred days in, my mind is constantly trying to convince me that I am that easy drinker; a woman who sips on her champagne; a woman who doesn’t get “too drunk” because it’s tacky; a woman who can have a few, enough to be fun and not enough to become someone else.

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I am not that woman. I am a guzzler, I don’t sip. I take big gulps and refuse to let a drop be wasted. I am almost always too drunk. When I’m afraid I can’t drink as much as I want, I take a big swallow of whatever I can get my hands on privately. I’m fun, until I’m not. I’m fine, until I’m a mess.

There is no grey in my drinking. There is only white, and there is only blackout.

In sobriety, I had to figure out what it was I was actually supposed to do with my girlfriends, particularly the ones that I was the most party-girl with before. But getting right down into it, I realized that I wasn’t thinking of wine as the activity. It was the bonding that a magnum of rosé allowed us to do that was the activity.

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What I really think Big Alcohol is selling women with bubble gum vodka, and Mommy Juice, and enough cosmopolitans to drown New York City, is a feeling of connectedness.

And, “Come by for a glass of wine,” is a secret code of sorts; it allows us to say, “Come over. Tell me all your secrets, and I’ll tell you all of mine, because I need your good advice.” Or, it says, “I know you’re sad. I want to be there for you. I want to offer you a shoulder in your time of need.” Sometimes, it says, “I’m proud of you. I want to celebrate your accomplishments, I want to hear you tell me how you achieved this monumental thing.”

We’re being told the only way we can bond with each other is over a few drinks. I have a problem with that. So now, when I see my girlfriends for a Diet Coke, I just say, “Tell me all your secrets, and I’ll tell you mine.”

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Bailey Reid is a strategist at MediaStyle and co-host of the Bad + Bitchy podcast.

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